This year was the 5th version of the Linked Data on the Web Workshop co-located at the World Wide Web Conference going on in Lyon, France.

At this workshop, seven issues caught my attention:

1) Media: Yunja Li presented on Synote: Weaving Media Fragments and Linked Data. This is interesting for those who not only want to link to an entire video, but want to link to a part of a video at a specific interval of time, and also add metadata information about that.

2) NLP to Linked Data: How can we relate the results of different named entity extraction tools to Linked Data. Giuseppe Rizzo introduced their project, NERD, which is working on this area.

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NOTE: This post is provided by guest author, Mr. Dennis E. Wisnosky, Chief Technical Officer and Chief Architect, Business Mission Area, U.S. Department of Defense. Dennis will be delivering a Special Presentation, “The Enterprise Information Web: Analytics, Efficiency and Security” at the June SemTechBiz Conference.

Semantic Technology brings a number of unique capabilities to data stores and applications.  These capabilities evidence themselves both at the user interaction level, in what users can do with and expect from Semantic technologies; and at the system level, in terms of things applications can do internally without rework or recoding.  Semantic Technology, based upon W3C standards, provides capabilities significantly beyond those of proprietary approaches based on technologies that were founded a half century earlier.

1. User Interaction Capabilities

Access to Meaning

Semantic Technology is based upon the development of the ontology of a particular domain.   That is, “what do I need to know to have an unambiguous understanding of a particular thing, organization, subject, etc.?”  This knowing is based upon precise understanding of the meaning of words used in the domain.  A Semantic-Technology-based application depends on and provides a user with access to the defined meaning of the terms—the vocabulary, the words—used in the application.  This means access to a human-only readable definition, such as one found in a dictionary, and access to the formalized definition found in the ontology that frames the system which executes the application.  Such access should be presented in a human consumable form, and is one of the areas in which various formalisms such as Controlled Natural Language (CNL) are useful for translating technical forms of ontologies, such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL) , a W3C standard, to provide a human consumable form.

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At the recent SemTech Berlin conference, husband-and-wife team Michael Trevor McDonald and Kim Chandler McDonald, CTO and Executive VP, respectively, of KimmiC, led a session that discussed a marriage of a different sort: that between the Semantic Web and the user interface.  The session was described as providing the audience insight into the benefits of the semantic web, given that so much of the world’s economic brain/ecosystem is tied up in the relationships between companies, consumers and suppliers – an interaction between systems and people that is a real-life ‘Matrix’ whose ubiquity is hampered by the lack of a common way of talking about things such that they can be utilized and shared simply, and in a confidential, secure, and vendor-neutral manner.

The Semantic Web Blog had an opportunity to have an email discussion with the Australian-based minds behind KimmiC, and its FlatWorld cloud-based technology for enabling the global, digital economy, to learn more about the SemWeb/UI marriage.

Semantic Web Blog: Help us better understand this idea of The Matrix in the context described – considering the movie, is that a positive analogy and what does the Semantic Web have to do with it?

Michael: I think we can use the analogy pretty well as is. What we have seen in the market is essentially a few large companies trying to subvert the intent of the web into a controlled matrix (controlled by them) that they can exploit – it is, in fact, the cornerstone of their business models.

We view that consumers, once they become more aware of it, will see themselves as a “knowledge/insight” commodity in that they a) control their information and b) control who, when and where (what part) companies/friends/family etc. have access to them – it is most probably the next big frontier.

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Kevin Fitchard recently asked the question, “Is Google scared of Siri? Is Yelp? Is Facebook? If they aren’t they should be, as should any mobile website, service or app that depends on advertising for revenues. Siri is just the beginning of a new wave of user interfaces (UIs) that will gradually shift our attention away from our phones’ screens, allowing us to interact with our devices in ways that don’t involve tapping keys and staring at pixels.” Read more

Mike Bergman recently shared some helpful information regarding ontology-driven apps. He begins, “For some time now, Structured Dynamics (SD) has been touting the unique advantages of ODapps, or  ontology-driven applications. ODapps are modular, generic software applications designed to operate in accordance with the specifications contained in one or more ontologies. The relationships and structure of the information driving these applications are based on the standard functions and roles of ontologies (namely as domain ontologies), as supplemented by UI and instruction sets and validations and rules. When these supplements are added to standard ontology functions, we collectively term them adaptive ontologies.” Read more

Basis Technology is searching for a Software Architect in Cambridge, MA. The company is looking for someone “to lead a team through the exciting process of building a world-class text analytics solutions platform that combines scalable processing and flexible UI. Successful candidates will have a strong affinity for Java-based solutions and a proven track record of Agile technical leadership in designing and implementing complex systems of many components that scale across systems and clusters.” Read more

SemanticWeb.com is pleased to announce that we are sponsoring a Web Mining Hack Day, Saturday, June 25, 2011 in Palo Alto, California. More details below after the jump.

Hosted by AOL, and organized by Diffbot and StartX (the Stanford University incubator), the Hack Day promises to be a great opportunity for back-end coders and UI/UX design experts to get together with the goal of building exciting semantic applications. The organizers suggest that participants will be able to:

1. Meet and network with other web mining experts, hackers, and students.
2. Learn about new semantic technologies and open web APIs.
3. See the new the AOL West Coast Headquarters, StartX, Stanford University’s startup accelerator.  Have some pizza on us.
4. Hack on new ideas and show off your projects.

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If you missed last week’s excellent discussion with Bart van Leeuwen and Adrian Gschwend of netlabs.org, the recorded webcast is now available.  In this webcast, Adrian and Bart talk about the exciting work they are doing using Semantic Technology to help fire fighters get to incidents faster.

NOTE: This webcast is presented here in three parts.

The slides used in the presentation are available here: http://ktk.netlabs.org/misc/SemanticWeb-Webcast.pdf

Part 1:

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